


In the After

by 9_of_Clubs



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Black Panther Shuri (Marvel), Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky and Shuri are BFFs, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M'Baku is a Good, M/M, Meetings in the Ancestral Plane, Okoye and Shuri are sisters and bosses, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre Infinity War Wakandan Family, Reunions, Shuri and Steve spar and cry, Shuri is Queen, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 07:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17018544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/9_of_Clubs/pseuds/9_of_Clubs
Summary: In the After, Shuri lives, rules, fights, loves, and drags herself, her country, and a whole host of foolish men through the end of the world.In the After, Shuri survives.--There’s another moment of hesitation, but then Thor has yanked Steve into their hug and one broken whole shapes itself again.Nebula and Rocket have vanished.She stands alone to the side and misses the specters of her own family keenly. Bucky would have rolled his eyes, but felt the prickles of envy, T’Challa would have smiled fondly, pleased at such a reunion, and she’d have draped her arms around them both, grinning, teasing them indiscriminately for being such losers.We’re with you.Her chin tilts up.Up is always better than down.





	In the After

They tell Shuri she is a genius, the smartest person in the galaxy, perhaps. But for all her wisdom, she cannot understand this set of words being repeated to her.  
  
"No." She shakes her head, though she has seen her Dora vanish with her own eyes. "No, you are joking. This. It is not very funny. It is not a funny thing to do, if he is trying to repay me for my pranks, tell him this is unkind."  
  
Because she _is_ a genius, and a warrior, but also still a sister, in so many ways, a child, there is nothing in her that prepares her for this knowledge, which strikes in glancing, painful ways, choking.

She is all of those things. 

And now. Also-

She is Queen.  
  
There is a splintering inside her, along the fault lines of her heartbeats, a breathless disbelief which twists into the unconquerable ache of shock, and her eyes are burning. She has lived in this place but once before, as her brother fell for an eternity and grief had struck her frozen. But she had born witness then, the images etched behind her eyes, and this time, he has gone away without her. And so, and so -

"Please." She does not want to plead, she is a Queen, Queens do not plead, her brother would not plead, or perhaps, for her, he would. She would not wish this on anyone, but for an instant, she would give the gods whatever they desired to switch their places. They need him, they all need him, the world, the nation, and she - she needs him, and she is not ready for this, not alone.

For a minute she is furious with him. For having allowed this. For having vanished. He is the King. He is her brother. By her accounts, and her accounts do not fail her, there is no one in the world stronger.

And now, dust. 

"Please.” She murmurs again, the adrenaline exploding inside of her, the hazy numbness of endorphins as her body tries to protect her mind from this pain which is ravaging at the corners, readying itself for a strike. “We have only just got him back." Two years have passed since T’Challa’s eyes opened again in the snow, and still the nightmares strike her in the night.  
  
Bucky says-  
  
She pauses for a split of a second as the thought strikes her, and casts her eyes among the _strangers_ left in the room. One, two, three - and there he isn't. The Captain's eyes meet hers, tired, red, barely seeing, from where the Widow supports his weight. Broken weight, and there's a deadness in his gaze which she knows is growing in hers.  
  
His eyes make it real.  
  
She thinks maybe she is screaming.  
  
\--  
  
The ceremony is quiet on this day. The remainders of their people, those not scattered to the wind, gathered, dressed in the marks of mourning. The whole world is mourning, she thinks, and Wakanda is its center now, and she will be the Queen, take up the mantle of the Black Panther.  
  
She sees the echoes of herself, smiling in the crowd, making everyone draw in their breath and then complaining of corsets, it seems an eternity ago. She had not lost T'Challa then yet, not even once.  
  
There had been singing too, uproarious joy, her beloved brother crowned, and her heart had sung with them. There was no man more ready to be King, and there was no subject more loyal than she. That's where she belongs, at his side, home in the lab, winning for them with her mind, while T'Challa punches things. Her lips twitch a little, despite themselves, he would protest if he were here, and of course, she is only teasing. _You know I am only teasing._  
  
But of course, he can't know. Because he doesn't know anything anymore.  
  
"Is there anyone who wishes to challenge?" The arbiter intones formally, and all the tribes, in a break with tradition, as though none of them can bare to drag this out any longer than necessary, refuse at once.  
  
M'Baku steps forward and for a minute the world is still, for a terrible minute, she considers it might be easier, to let him kill her, to let him rule. Her mother's eyes are glittering from the stands, and she pushes away the thoughts. She cannot win but she will try.  
  
He falls instead to his knees at her feet. "The Jabari will not challenge." The words upturn towards her, his eyes are dark and stormy. "My Queen." And softly, only to her. "Wakanda needs you."  
  
Needs me? That foolish little girl from whom you take orders now? A part of her wants to smile. But the little girl is gone and a Queen must play her role.  
  
She inclines her head to him and as clearly as she can manage, only he close enough to hear the shake of her lips, she yells to the crowd with a cross of her hands.  
  
"WAKANDA FOREVER."  
  
T'Challa is gone, her King is gone, half her people are gone, there are other painful losses, but if a single one of them is here, if she is here, than Wakanda lives, and she must live with it.  
  
Tears are forming in her throat, hot and wet, sobs, as for a moment, they are alive again, the echoing response to her salute ringing over the cliffside.  
  
Wakanda Forever.  
  
\--  
  
There is no precedence for a foreigner being invited to the ceremony, because there has never been a ceremony for whom one has been present to consider, but here she will not yield.  
  
Okoye frowns and asks the question she has bitten back again and again all day. “Are you certain, my Queen?”

Which comes a little less true from Okoye these days, given the way her eyes worriedly track after a certain blonde, if she ceases paying attention to her movements for a breath. T'Challa would have laughed, delighted. _“General, it is a fine match, your blades will be very happy together, I am sure.”_ His chuckles are echoes in her ear.  
  
But T'Challa is not here, and she _is_ certain. In deference to tradition, she did not bring him to the meeting of the tribes, in deference to herself and to her brother, who loved him, or perhaps was falling in love with him, she brings him here.

Her anchors have been cut loose, as his have, and if they have come to understand the stone had split souls along their halves, it had managed to quarter them. Across the lines of their losses, perhaps in only slightly differing orders, they mourn the same.  
  
She practices her Queen stare on Okoye who huffs, nods, curt, and then pulls her into an embrace, strong arms wrapping themselves around her shoulders. Though she is not, she feels frail. Perhaps this the last time she will smallness in her bones.

"I know how much you miss them."  
  
To that she cannot speak, so she only clings, lets herself be held by this fierce defender, the two of them, who loved her brother so much, with all their wisdoms and talents combined, and couldn't save him.

Footsteps sound, and Okoye moves back again, the warmth of her fading from Shuri’s skin, she resumes her straight back stance, the glower filling her eye once more, the faintest current of mistrust, as he rounds the corner, uncertain, tired as he always is these days, a thin thread of stubborn determination pushing his weary limbs forward. His beard is longer, the circles under his eyes darker, and the ever swell of loneliness is choking around him.

She tries to smile, though in truth she feels no better than he.

“Captain.”

His eyes settle on her, and she feels that smallness again, he is so tall and broad and powerful, wears it more openly than T’Challa did, and these days, the laughter from his eyes has scrubbed, a dangerous point sharpened, but she knows he wouldn’t hurt her, that he is more liable to hurt himself, than any of the rest of them. That he’d hold every soul left on earth down to the ground, if it meant no more loss, although he barely cares about the earth at all anymore.

But he cares for her.

Something passes behind his eyes as they watch each other, some resonating understanding.

“You’ll be different.” He murmurs to her after a fashion. Okoye bristles behind her, because he does not greet her back, but she is more interested in the curious twistings of his mind. She remembers him from the memories in Bucky’s head, small and sickly, more breakable than she is now, but resilient. She wonders what he sees when he looks at her. “After.”

“I will be stronger.” She agrees, and he shakes his head.

He laughs, a half scrape of sound, and a part of her aches to go to him. Their laughter at unfunny things, the dark twisting of the noise from the broken parts of their souls, is nearly identical. She thinks of Bucky’s almost maddened noises, at the beginning, when he wasn’t sure how to cry, when he couldn’t understand enough to speak, and they echo here now, from the half of them that was supposed to be whole.

“You’ll just be able to punch harder.” He murmurs as though he can’t seem to stop himself, but apology flushes through his cheeks as the words ring out, maybe at the slight uptick of her brow.

He inhales and exhales.

Speaks again.

“You’re already strong enough.”

\--

The herb is only barely grown ready, when they pluck it from its branch, only just at its first blush of ripening. It will do its job, but like her, it was not quite meant to be at center just yet.

She opens her lips to accept it all the same.

It floods through her like salt on an open wound, raising a groan from her lips that is not exactly pain, but the acute pressing of a force against every broken part inside of her. For a breath, it is like being indestructible, for a breath, the mourning is gone, for a breath, there is no pain of loss, only this pain of power seeping into her.

_You’ll be different._

The sand that flutters down to cover her reminds her of the ashes strewn across their land. Steve’s eyes are on it too, unseeing, but she is on a different plane, and she knows the truth twists roughly against her somewhere, but she cannot taste it just now.

A voice calls for T’Challa to guide her, and behind her eyes flash visions, laughter as they race through an open plain, his arms around her, carrying her home, as she screams of a snake bite, her fingers racing across keys beneath his amused smile, her arms around him as he sobs for their father, next to him with a camera, laughing as she takes a picture of them lit up by the sunset, and he falls, and he falls, and she’s screaming. 

Silence. 

He smiles at her.

And she rises from dust, her sweaty, ceremonial garb vanished into a loose flowing gown that rises with the swells of wind.

It is her favorite time, golden afternoon, the sun rays are low in the horizon and the world is still. Wakanda is beautiful, as it always is, but once again, untouched, unmarred by war, by the heavy weight of mourning, there is no dust here. Colors dance in the sky, hazy rainbows that mark the vision space.

Her science would tell her she is hallucinating.

Her spirit knows that is not so.

Perhaps, this is only in her head.

Perhaps, this is real.

“Shuri.” His voice is a warm gasp of relief, and she turns blindly into his embrace. Already, the tears are coming, prickling hot in the corners of her eyes. She holds him, and beneath her touch he is real. The solidity of his muscles, of his bones, of _him_.

 _Don’t go again._ She wants to sob, she wants to scream. _Stay. Please just stay._

“I cannot do this without you.” The words spin out instead, in a panicked muddled, in a whisper plea.

“Without me?” His voice is still smiling, but sad, as gently, he makes space between their bodies to find her eyes. “Never.”

She does cry then, in heaving, sobbing fits that she has kept back for fear that once started they would never stop, they burst from her now, with T’Challa’s finger gently tilting her cheek, an unending void, a flood that has no drought. 

“There will be no moment when you are without me.” There’s a quiet ache in his voice that creeps in now, which twists her stomach, because this is fleeting, because she doesn’t get to keep him, to bring him back. He is so solid, but he is not hers any longer, she couldn’t protect him and she couldn’t keep him, and she misses him so much, and so unbearably. He would be enough for everyone, he would bring them all together, he would lead, but there is only her.

“And you are ready.”

His hand presses beneath her jaw until her eyes are up, her back is straight.

“There is no one who has ever been more fit to be Queen than my sister. I only wish…” 

He hesitates, his eyes are wet too now, a tear tracking a trail down his cheek. “I only wish I might have seen it.” His chuckle, which fills an empty void her ears have strained and strained to hear over the days that she has lived without him, shudders through her. “You bringing the world to its knees.” 

Through tears, she lifts her head higher, resolve and misery and love. 

“You will.” She vows to him here, in this liminal space, in this space where the gods walk. She vows so that they hear her too. “I swear to you brother, I will find a way.”

The brush of lips to her forehead is soft.

“I love you.” The words breathe into her skin. “Never forget.”

Abruptly, she is alone again, but she does not awaken.

The haze of light dances, the sun sets another fraction, the wind changes direction. 

It is more with her heart than with her senses that she knows that he is there, leaning uncertainly against a tree.

“They could not give you another arm in death?” Her fingers reach out to run across the vibranium attached to his left. His smile is tired, twisted in a thousand new ways that she will not be able to help him through, but whole. 

“That arm belongs to a guy who died a long time ago.” He shrugs his shoulder. “This one, I guess, belongs to the guy who died just now.” There’s a glimmer of affection that rises so strongly in his eyes, that the tears start to churn again. “Besides, heard it was made by a Queen.”

Laughter bubbles from her throat, giggle mixing with a sharp sound of pain, tangled in loss. 

She had not known where to begin in grieving this loss, her charge, her ward, this man that she knows better than he knows himself, that she understands, and has saved, who has reached for her, different than another project, human. This man that she loves.

She reaches for him, as is their way, a hand to his chin, soft, and he looks at her for a long moment.

“I thought maybe, someday, I -” The exhale is long, but she waits, patient, a pounding ache in her heart to think this is the last time, perhaps, they will exist in this space, as he fights to form his thoughts and she anchors him, tugs him along through the swells and the swirls to a point of understanding. “I thought I could get better, maybe, be _stronger_ , and then I could protect you too.” His voice comes out a little choked now, stilted and studded with breathless pain. His pain is always beautiful in its harrowing way, a suffering that she will never be able to taste but through him. “But I guess I’m always running out of time.”

Her fingers tighten on his cheek and he shakes his head a little.

“Sorry.” He breathes, and it _aches_ . “I just mean. If I wanted _anything_ at all, it was to keep you from ever feeling this, _like this,_ just wanted you to stay in that lab and be safe. I thought someday I could help keep you safe, like you - like you _saved_ me. And now -”

He cuts off and his breath is trembling and hers is too.

“Now, you have to keep yourself alive.” There’s an almost desperate edge to the whisper. “You’re strong enough to do that. Don’t let anything take pieces of you.”

_You’re already strong enough._

It’s hard in this place, to be the stable one, as she usually is, to be steady, to offer what he needs. It’s hard because she’s breaking already. “You _are_ pieces of me.”

And this time, he does reach out, as is not his way, in this place, _he_ reaches for _her_ , draws her closer, and he’s strong too, despite the way wounds never heal to whole all the way, despite the fractures in his solidity, and the shatters in his foundations, his arms are strong, and he is, in a way he could never see, but they all do, for him.

“We’re with you.” 

She holds onto him fiercely, like she did with T’Challa, as though her fingers could bridge the gap between their worlds. 

“I’ll live.” She vows her second vow to the spirits, and the wind, and to him. Live to bring them back, as she swore to T’Challa, live in the meanwhile, for the life that is taken from him over and over again. 

The universe, she considers, as she has only considered a few times in her whole existence, is cruel.

The time is coming to a close and she can feel it, he can too, she thinks, and there’s something in the pain that shatters suddenly between them, that draws her away.

“Tell me.” She orders, as his Queen, as his friend, as she has so many times before, when she saw the words sticking to the edges of his mouth, begging to be spoken, but unable to be made.

Their eyes flash together, and he gives in to her, as he always does, unlocks the door to let the vulnerability flood from its gates.

“Will you save him?” He murmurs to her after a breath, in a way that is so childlike in its misery, so unbearably plaintive, so lost, it steals her breath. And she knows that he does not wish to lay more at her feet, and yet, she is the only person he has at all to ask. “Please, I -”

_I love him._

“Death cannot stop true love.” She murmurs, a lifetime ago, it seems, they had curled in bed, the sudden absence of Steve again, off on another mission, rife between them, to watch marathons of movies together until the alteration of reality had completed. She had been angry with the Captain then, for leaving. It had seemed such a hurt. And now, now everything hurts.

Bucky’s smile is small and sad.

“I will get you back.” She repeats again, to another person she has loved and lost in this world.  
  
“The two of you always do.”

And then she is gasping back to the pain of reality, power surging through her muscles, tears streaming down her face.

As the sand falls away from her, she finds Steve in the dimness. There are tears, bright and streaking across his skin, shimmering as firelight dances along his cheek.

She _is_ different.

This _is_ real.

\--  
  
“We should train.” 

He comes to her an evening a few days later. He has finally showered, it seems, but there is still something that makes him awful to look at, every cell that composes his skin somehow turned to shards. She has been too busy to work on keeping her promise, but she has thought about it near constantly. Bucky premises his faith in her abilities on the notion that she had saved him, and so she can save anyone. But Steve has closed himself off, has vanished from the man she has come to know over the last two years of her life. The man with the dancing blue eyes, who held Bucky’s hand too hard and shared searing glances with her brother, who came weary, but shed his hard shell with his uniform, and smiled easily, and kissed Bucky into the grass. She does not know this man who lives in him now, and he does not look for her.

On top of this, there have been meetings to attend, clean up to oversee, her nation needing her aid, a whole world in disarray needing it too. Several world leaders have gone, and the tension is high. The universe could tip towards community or sundering, and the next days, the next hours, might determine that. The thought of war, after all this loss, is almost unbearable, but she is not naive enough to think it is impossible. Some nations will be stronger in the aftermath, some weaker. Wakanda is strongest, in many ways, so it falls to her to force men to fight their impulses towards selfishness, to listen to a girl, to look for peace in this strife.

In truth, no one knows exactly what to do.

Tony Stark had reemerged yesterday alongside a figure of blue, his eyes as hollow as the rest and for a moment the world seemed to rejoice, a hero back when so many have been lost. Shuri had watched the news quietly, her lips in a straight line.

In Bucky’s memories, this man menaces, attacks, hurts - pushes Bucky, who already thinks perhaps his death would be preferable, closer to the edge of that cliff. In Bucky’s memories, he understands why the other did this.

But Bucky is always understanding why he should be hurt. Shuri has no such compassion.

Shuri does not.

But the Queen needs her allies, and Iron Man is respected and he is loved, in this moment, he is necessary.

She invites him to Wakanda with Nat behind her. There’s pain there, between them all, a long moment of silence, but he assents, his eyes darting across the screen as though someone else might appear.

 _Steve is mourning._ She wants to angrily gnash her teeth. _He won’t come to see you, because he is in pain, because he is barely alive. Is that not what you wanted?_

It is misplaced anger, she suspects, because she has no one else clear to be angry at, and he does not deserve it from her, and Bucky is not here to take offense to his presence, and Bucky wouldn’t anyway, would have just stayed in the shadows and torn himself to pieces, which makes her angrier, because no one deserved death less, and makes her miss T’Challa, who would be diplomatic in this situation, would somehow turn it to their advantage and unite them all. Would not give in to childish fits of grudge matches.

“Thank you Mr. Stark.” She had said and ended the call. Nat had watched her, humming.

“Steve will need his friends.” She’d said finally, in her way of no valance, no specific judgement or intonation. Just facts.

Friends, Shuri suspects, is not enough of a word for what they are. But Bucky and her brother are gone. They are gone. And the thought of Steve loving others should not anger her so.

She suspects that it does.

“We should train.”

Her eyes avert to him now, before her, in his pain.

“Train?” She repeats and he nods.

“I know you can fight, Prin- Qu- Shuri.” He stumbles on his words still, and it endears that small, untouched patch of her heart, the one that survives from the before time, golden and soft. “But you have to relearn how, now. You have to know your strength while we still have time to figure it out.”

She pictures his smaller incarnation in front of him, gangly limbs and short legs, knobby knees and faint strength. She wonders if anyone had asked him to train, or if he had wandered blind into the new truths of himself.

“Okay.” She says quietly, though she has no desire to fight, though she is tired and would rather let herself spill into her computer chair, try to learn more about the stones as she has been in every spare, waking hour, leaving Bruce to continue when duty called again. She likes him, as a companion, maybe as a friend, but he does not even begin to fill the spaces of loss inside of her. She wants to shut him out in truth, to answer curtly, and not otherwise speak, does not want anyone else to possibly lose in her life. But Bucky’s voice comes warning, and this she knows, would qualify as losing herself, so she learns his favorite foods, listens to his own exhausted tales, gives him back small parts of herself.

Steve, she follows now, but he doesn’t lead her to the training room, takes her outside to a quiet clearing, the gauntlets forming on his wrists. Wordlessly, she allows the suit, reconfigured through the blur of tears, to wrap around her body. In it, she feels a little better, a little more connected to _him_ , but still, empty.

Steve shifts until he is in front of her.

“Punch.”

She does, and he doesn’t move and it barely glances off his body.

He shakes his head.

“Punch.” He repeats, and she does, again, but it is like the strength will not be summoned, like she is still punching only with her fists, as they look, as they always have been, a flick of power against an immovable wall.

She tries again and again, and the next time he deftly catches her wrist.

“Are you angry?” He asks her, his voice rough against the breeze of the day.

“Yes.” She is. She is angry. She is furious. But she has been the Queen and the Queen must be calm 

“Then feel it.” The words are hard and she inhales, her fists balling. 

The response releases before she can stop herself. “As you do?” The words land hard and he flinches. 

She does not apologize.

“You have to be ready.” There’s only insistence on his tongue, no sign of pain or hurt, and that’s scarier, she thinks, because it’s truly possible he has neither one left in him, or that in the muddle of the pain that is already there, this does not even register.

“If I become angrier, will you become less so?” She poses instead, tries to punch once more, but still only her wrist throbs, he does not shift even an inch.

He shakes his head. “I can’t control this.” A truth he believes in.

“Are you trying?” She challenges.

His eyes find hers, even behind the mask. “Are you?”

She growls a little, and in answer, something surges, tightens her muscles. His face remains impassive, her breaths draw hard.

A part of her wants to insist that she lost them too, that she understands, but she knows she doesn’t, can’t, can’t even begin to imagine how this loss falls across his shoulders, another fall before his eyes, another moment where death and survival crossed paths, and he lived, and Bucky died.

Again and again, Steve survives, and he wishes he would simply end.

But he has to continue. He has to. She promised.

“I miss him.” She says instead, and the truth of the statement twists into her soul, mixes with the bubbling anger. This time Steve’s face shifts as though he’d been slapped, and there’s something bright and shattered in his inhale, alight with anguish. A glimmer of life.

Good.

She punches again and force presses into it, envelops her arm, and the impact shakes him, if only a little, makes him reset his stance.

“We used to sit just there.” Her chin tilts back towards the clearing, and she thinks of Bucky smiling, Bucky, calm, Bucky, alive. She thinks of T’Challa hovering over them, fussing, as he always did. She thinks of their eyes meeting.

“Stop.” Steve’s breaths are gasping. “Stop.”

She punches again and he half steps back with the force.

“He hated to be inside too much.” Her voice is still steady but the tears are glittering into it, studding her throat with liquid, her eyes starting to burn. “But he loved the sky. Would just lay out all day and watch it change - he told me once that it was his favorite when it was blue like your eyes.”

Those eyes that have been only darkness in the week that has passed, more pupil and white, stained with bloody veins, than blue like the sky. But there’s blue there now, creeping in around the edges.

“Please.” He mouths and she strikes again, once, twice, three times, the suit responds to her, the power thrums through her, it feels good in a way, to lash out, to be free. As Queen she must be calm, but she is the Panther here, he makes no move to block her blows.

Inhales with every one, as though trying to steady himself, trying to keep the black box of darkness he has built around his own soul intact, to taste only numbness.

“I told him he was hopeless. And he laughed.”

“I don’t -” Steve’s eyes are closed now, defeated, rings of tears catching in eyelashes as they curl along his cheeks.

“And he loved you.” And suddenly the anger is hot again, anger at the universe, anger at herself, anger at Steve, she’s not even sure what about, but its inferno inside of her, inferno that crashes against the rocks and foams with despair. “He loved you, he loved you so fucking much. And he’s gone, but you, you’re -”

Energy crackles between her cells, surges through her body, twines around her arm, and this time, when her fist crashes into the expanse of his chest, all of him flies into the air, the sensation beats around her as he suspends, crashes and crumples to the ground, something like relief in his body, at being punished somehow, maybe.

She’s in front of him in a flash, kneeling next to him, hands in the fabric of his uniform - her mask fading away.

“I am angry.” She murmurs. “But I’m here. _I_ am alive. _You_ are alive. And no one will remember him if you don’t.”

Steve is sobbing beneath her grasp, his whole body is contorting, the way hers had in the vision space, he’s coming apart at the seams, unable to breathe, unable to stop, and her hands dig in and hold him as he crashes again, hits ledge after ledge on the way down, until she fears she’s pushed too far, that something has snapped irreparably.

But slowly, the sounds subside, and the quiet leeches into their space again.

“I couldn't save him.” The words are less words and more broken fragments of noise. Her fingers trail up to his hair, and stroke slowly through it.

“If you can’t save yourself.” She murmurs, “It won’t be worth trying to figure out how you _will_.”

He says nothing and they stay like that, until darkness comes over the earth, and little points of light twinkle out towards them. Light from thousands of years ago, she thinks idly to herself, maybe a little speck of light from a time they were happy.

“Bucky loved the stars here.” He whispers to her and she lays herself on the dirt next to him, listens to his heart pound in his chest.

\--

Tony comes the next morning, and they are still asleep on the plain. Perhaps not the best look for a Queen, but it had been a necessary one for a friend.

She greets him with twigs still in her hair, and his lips, forcibly sad, twitch for a breath, but fall again as his gaze crosses to Steve, silent behind her, in even worse shape.

The other Avengers pile into the room, and the awkwardness fades, a little. Rhodey covers Tony with his body, and Nat glares at him before pulling him too into a hug, though one that seems more than a little painful. Bruce smiles his awkward, happy grin and Thor booms eagerly forward, a smile that she has not seen grace his features escaping through the gloom and wraps them all in his arms.

The blue woman who introduces herself as Nebula in curt tones turns to Rocket, and for a minute, the cold in her eyes fades to pain.

They are all halved, but they are all here.

Steve moves tensely forward and everyone’s breath holds.

“Hey Tony.” He murmurs in a voice not yet recovered from screams. 

“Hey Cap.” And the other sounds much the same, in truth, wrecked against the rocks. 

There’s another moment of hesitation, but then Thor has yanked Steve into their hug and one broken whole shapes itself again.

Nebula and Rocket have vanished.

She stands alone to the side and misses the specters of her own family keenly. Bucky would have rolled his eyes, but felt the prickles of envy, T’Challa would have smiled fondly, pleased at such a reunion, and she’d have draped her arms around them both, grinning, teasing them indiscriminately for being such losers.

_We’re with you._

Her chin tilts up.

Up is always better than down.

\-- 

Steve comes to sit in her lab now, takes up the empty spot Bucky vacated. His fingers touch along the scatters of debris the other left there, that she hasn’t, and likely never will, clean away. A scarf, a hairbrush, a notebook - Steve’s fingers pause on that one, but he doesn’t take it. He will, eventually, she knows, and it’s his, really.

He doesn’t speak much, but he sits, eats the food offered to him when it comes, and presses himself from one moment to the next. When she tell him they need him to speak to the public, he agrees, when she asks him his opinions on the research she’s doing, he gives them. It’s not ideal, but it’s not disintegration.

Bruce sits with them too, most days, as they try to figure out where Thanos is, figure out if they have enough data to save Vision, figure out how to undo the snap, figure out so many things her head is spinning.

 And sometimes, Tony also comes - chooses the space as far as possible from Steve, pushes himself as away as he can go.   

There’s a grief in his eyes when he looks at her working, when she says something particularly clever, and she doesn’t know who he is seeing, but that someone is gone.

 Steve watches him watch her, and stays in his corner, his fingers curling around a book Bucky was midway through reading. There’s a cheap plastic bookmark, decorated with a shield, stuck into one of the pages. His fingers tighten around it, his eyes slide back to Tony.

Sometimes, she’s not sure why it’s her lot in life to be graced with foolish men.

 But time passes, and the shift happens as she know that it will and one day, Tony is not on his side of the equation anymore. Has crossed over, pulled a chair over to Steve’s corner, his fingers drumming nervously, flitting like birds across his tech and over the table and onto his knees. Their shoulders lean together, a shared drape of weight.

 Something does sink in her heart, but mostly it is the heaviness of memory, and not anger. Bucky pressing against Steve as they lay on a blanket, his head on his chest, his eyes closed, Steve’s hand on her brother’s shoulder, squeezing, after a long absence, their eyes warming as their gazes meet, all three of them, tangled in a laughable configuration of limbs and hands as they walked, an unclear beginning and ending of bodies, down a street. She had loved their joy together, she had been elated for them.

 But that time has gone.

 Tony turns, to see the weight of her gaze on them, the expression on her features, which she is sure is great and terrible all at once, and inclines his head to her.

 She wants to hate him.

 She wants to hate them.

 But Bucky had asked for her to save Steve, and so she nods her head back, accepts, and turns instead to her work.

 She will not take any more from him than has already been taken.

\-- 

M’Baku finds her in the garden during a rare moment alone, and it is good to see him.

He smiles at her and it is almost like having T’Challa again, almost, a familiar grin of a brother, looking fond at his little sister.

 She must be so big for so many these days, it is nice, in this moment, to be small again.

 “Ungudadewethu njani.” His embrace is warm around her and she holds him.

 “As well as can be.” She pulls her shoulders to her ears and he ruffles her hair with a big palm.

 “I should say, ikumkani wam or Okoye will have my head.” He teases with a show of teeth. To think she had thought him violent once, had been fearful of the Ape King in the mountains.

 “Not a child?” She laughs back at him. “Who scoffs at tradition?”

He does not have the decency to look apologetic. “Still that.” He winks at her. “Always that, but also a Queen. In the face of aliens and the craziness of the world, I would not have fared as you do.”

“You would have found a way.”

He huffs at her, tucking an arm around her shoulder as they continue her walk, weaving through the fragrant blooms, fluffs of seed blowing lazily around them in the air. “But I prefer that you do instead.”

“I can imagine.”

For a time, they settle into familiar rhythms of a life they have never experienced together. She talks about the projects she has set up that are only for Wakanda, about the children in the palace, gossips about those few people that they both know, and he tells her of the antics of his soldiers, of new dishes he has been experimenting with, of how the winter has been in the mountains. They don’t speak of death or ash, of gauntlets or titans, for a moment, she breathes in the mundanity of existence, the comfort of a person whom she has known all her life, even if not always peaceably.

M’Baku draws out her laughter, the tease in her voice, the lilt of ease that has been so lacking, that she has missed in herself. She is free for a beat, from the heavy yoke of loss, from the ever press of grief, and that makes her so light, she wonders that she does not simply float away.

As they near the garden gates, he catches her, presses a kiss to the spot where T’Challa’s lips had lingered in her dream.

 “Uya kuzingca ngawe.”

  _He would be proud of you._

\--

On the event horizon of chaos, they sit together.

She lights a fire and makes offerings to the gods, ash for ash, dust for dust. She is a woman of science, but science had failed her, alone. And now science comes to work with gods and magic, and perhaps there is a chance. Perhaps they will rescue themselves from this limbo, from this horrific liminal space that they have dragged themselves, but have not really lived through.

The soul stone works by sacrifice, Nebula had explained to them all, it takes what it gives, the splitting of a whole, of a universe. From each of them, it had stolen what had mattered most, unless like Thor, there was nothing left to lose at all. Little relief for him, she is certain. And they, all of them, have been rended.

Rocket and Nebula sit together, silent. Thor is atypically withdrawn next to them, and Bruce is glancing around, eyes darting from side to side as though someone will come and attack them in the dark. Tony fidgets as he always does. To his left, Nat leans against Okoye, who allows this, but her glare is a dare for anyone to speak. It makes Shuri smile, even now. Clint, a late arrival, peers over at them, perplexed, maybe, but pleased, and Scott next to him is about to open his mouth and find out the hard way he ought to keep it shut, but their second captain, Carol, elbows him hard in the ribs. A save just in time.

Steve has put himself next to her. 

Always walking the worlds.

“We will all be together soon.” She reaches out to squeeze his hand, his roughened fingers twisting to curl around hers in response. It’s a dangerous whisper, dangerous hope for a dangerous plan, but recklessness sings through her. 

They’ve worked so hard and given so much. 

It will work.

It has to.

He is not back to her friend, to the person he was before, but she has changed too.

_You’ll be different, after._

And perhaps there is no going back to who they were, this damage a permanent scar, but sometimes, she has learned, there is no way out but through. They’ve grown together in their pain, reshaped into new beings, but still, they are fragmented, only parts of a whole that is seeking. That will break down eventually, without stability, as unstable elements always do. 

And Steve Rogers, in this moment, for the first time in one year, five months, three weeks, two days, ten hours, fifty six minutes, and an infinitesimal amount of moments since they were broken by the world, offers her a semblance of a smile.

“We will.” 

She tries to hope he means alive. 

\--

The reversal comes slowly, reports from around the world seem to indicate appearances in all corners of the globe, interview after interview of relief. They seem normal, those who have been righted again, and that seems to be good news.

They all wait, in their ways.

Tony waits anxiously, he makes a mess in her lab, scattering papers and tech everywhere with overly exuberant twists of his arm, refuses to come out to eat, and mutters endlessly to himself. Only Steve can make him sit still for more than moments, make him shower, make him function, but Steve is waiting too.

He waits actively. He washes himself for longer than thirty seconds, he trims his beard, he asks her to help him buy the first new clothes he’s worn in the better part of two years, he starts running again, starts talking again, lifts himself out of the dead space he’d lived in, as though determined to be whole again, in time. Shuri shakes her head quietly as she meets Nat’s eyes, but she doesn’t stop him. He’s happier than he has been in memory now, and even though it verges on manic, she allows it.

She doesn’t ask him what the four of them will do.

Okoye waits tensely and Shuri does not begrudge her the desire for her King back. In fact, Shuri is more than ready to never be Queen again. She has been Queen, in her estimations, for far too long already and that is Queen enough for a lifetime.

“I do not mean any offense -” Her oldest friend begins and she waves off the curt words which ready themselves for censure.

“We will all be glad to have him back.” She offers with a smile, wraps her arms around the other who exhales, relieved, but anxious.

“Yes. We will.”

And Shuri. Shuri waits patiently, or at least, she tries to. She puts the thought of their return, as well as the grief of their absence, to the side, and works to focus on simply what she can control. A great many people are waiting for the universe to release them back into existence, after all. It could be months, or maybe more, before they are back, though she hopes not. She thinks they might all go insane, if they had to wait that long.

In the meanwhile, she helps those who she can. Sets up funds and organizations around the world to help with rehabilitation. Perhaps people no longer have homes, no longer have clothes, no longer have anything, after so long, perhaps they are all alone, and she could not stomach the thought of that for those whom she awaits. She meets with the UN and other world leaders, she meets with the representatives of her tribes, she works until she is so exhausted she can’t think, falls into dreamless sleep and starts again.

On a beautiful spring day, there is a sudden crash of explosion in her quarters and she rushes to the labs, to see that firstly, there are things on fire, and no one in the room is trying to put them out.

And secondly, Tony has his head buried into a stunned boy, who is gently patting his back.

“Hey there, Mr. Stark.” He grins out into the room, laughing as though he hasn’t just emerged from a kind of death, but his eyes are too bright, dangerously shining. “Guess you missed me, huh?”

As quietly as she can, she presses the button for the extinguisher.

The boy’s eyes flit to hers.

“I’m Peter.” He mouths over Tony’s back, his hand is clutching the shaking shoulders against his more tightly now and the tears are falling. “Neat digs.”

“Shuri.” She smiles back, and tiptoes out.

Her heart already, heals a little.

Five people whom she has never met stroll out of the woodwork the next day, greeted by uproarious Raccoon whoops and one cool stare. Thor, who has been quieter of late, in the face of the reemergences, knowing as he does, that he is not really waiting anyone, breaks into a booming laugh and crosses over, and they make space for him in their huddle. 

“Hello morons!” He greets, reveling, delighted in the fortune of others as though it were his own. He is good, she thinks, truly.

Sam Wilson comes strolling out of the forest the next week, and he and Steve stare at each other for a long, intense moment, Nat coming up towards them, just in time to see a scarlet haired woman emerging behind him. It will be something, Shuri considers, to tell Wanda they will likely be able to create Vision again as well, another happy ending.

Steve pulls Sam into a hug which has the other chuckling, pretend choking noises coming out of him, before he settles and hugs him back.

“Hey.” He murmurs. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Wanda leans her head against Nat’s shoulder and watches them. Their little underground family together again. 

Sam finds her later, with a half smile on his lips. They don’t know each other very well, only a voice on the other end of phone calls, interrupting and sarcastic. But he’s gruff now, when he speaks, sincere. “Thanks for looking out for him.” He shakes his head. “He’d have definitely wrecked himself on his own.” 

She nods, it’s true.

“I promised.”

He eyes her, but doesn’t ask who to.

“Any sign of his surlier half...third… uhm quarter, I guess, yet?”

“Bucky isn’t surly.” She defends automatically, and he snorts, but not unkindly. After a moment, she joins him. “Perhaps a little, but-” She sighs, shaking her head. “We can only wait.” 

“That asshole needs to hurry the fuck up.” He grouses and this time her finger is up.

“Bucky is not an asshole.”

It is good, at least, to laugh.

\-- 

It is her favorite time, golden afternoon, the sun rays are low in the horizon and the world is still. Wakanda is beautiful, as it always is, and the weight of mourning and war is lifting slowly. The earth heals, faster with vibranium at its roots, than it might have elsewhere, and they are all healing with it.

She knows in her bones, in her heart, and with every sense that she possesses, sight, and smell and touch, when her world rights itself again. A moment ago, she was the Queen, she was a warrior, and now, she is again, a sister, younger, if not a child. 

She turns into T’Challa’s smile and his arms, and he is brighter than the sun. Beneath her fingers, he is whole, his body is real, the spaces between his cells shrunk again to their rightful size, all the parts of him sewn back together, all the wrongness ended. She had not seen him fly apart, but she has dreamed it again and again in her nightmares. She tests his solidity now, hugs him as tightly as she can, gratified when he remains real beneath her touch, when he does not blow away with the wind. 

“Shuri.” He murmurs into her hair, and he’s crying. T’Challa has always cried easily, at movies, at sunsets, at videos of baby creatures, and he has always worn it shamelessly, he cries now, at holding her, and she twists her fingers into his robes. 

“My King.” She half laughs, half sobs. “My brother.” Her world is tilting, dangerously. Everything seems too much, all at once, relief mixes with ebullience, twists into the pain of everything she has felt over these months, it comes crashing and clashing into her, and at long last, that is okay. It is okay for her entire world to be collapsing, for her self possession to be thrown aside, for everything to shatter into itself, it is okay because there is someone there to catch her. 

“I promised I would find a way.” She murmurs, half collapsing into his arms, against his chest.

“And there is no one who I was more certain would succeed.” He whispers back. “My Queen.” She wants to smack him, to roll her eyes, to make a joke, to make it normal again, as fast as possible, but there are tears there in her eyes, and on her tongue, locking her throat, freezing her brain and everything is cloudy, and she is floating, floating out of her body.

“I have missed you.” 

They collapse there, in the field, on their knees, holding each other. A weight lifts from her shoulders, rises, and vaporizes, as only weights should. There will be a scar on her heart, a twin to the first time she lost him, but they are rising from the ashes now, taking flight again.

He is back.

He is real. 

She has kept his nation strong for him, she has kept his Captain alive, she has kept herself as whole as possible, and there is a space there waiting. Waiting for him. 

Wakanda Forever.

\--

She does not recall making it to her bed. The rest of the evening is a blur, perhaps she collapsed, her mind so tired of everything, of existing in the world, that there was no alternative choice, perhaps she can simply not remember what had happened over the flood of neurons crackling different emotions into her brain. A short circuit of happiness.

But even in dawning awareness, she knows, as she sits up, that she is not alone.

“I assume you have not yet been to see our good Captain, or you would never have been able to escape his arms to sit here quietly with me.”

Bucky’s smile is small, maybe a little nervous. He is still, as he gets when he is unsure, a mechanism of invisibility, she considers, but dismisses it for later. And what a relief it is, to have a later. 

“Thought I’d hide out with you for old time’s sake.” His murmur is low, and he’s pale, but the edges of his lips are quirking.

She lifts herself up to wrap her arms around him and thinks of the vision space, perhaps one day soon, he will reach out for her like that again. Until then, she holds him firmly, feels his eyes shutting against her shoulder.

“Thank you.” He whispers, an echo of their first meeting and she squeezes.

“I was doing it only for myself.” It is easier now, than it was with with her brother, to accept him back, to find the ways that they were between the ways that they are. “You practically swore your allegiance to me and I intend to hold you to it. This means no more siding with T’Challa.”

His laugh is whisper thin.

“And you kept yourself alive.” 

 _And Steve_. She hears in his aborted breaths.

“I promised.”

In the end, death can’t stop any kind of love. He’d kept her alive, and she’d kept him alive, and that had kept Steve alive, and if Steve wasn’t alive right now, none of them would be.

They stay there, in the silence, their heads together, one kind of whole together again.

\--

 Shuri had thought she had cried all her tears, but in the instant that Steve and Bucky see each other, her brother’s eyes crackling to life as well, they surface again, but she is glad for them.

 Steve looks dumbstruck, awestruck, like he has seen a miracle, felt a revelation, and in every way he has, he does, and then he has jumped to his feet, arm reaching out as far as it can go and he drags Bucky into him. They’re both crying, with every inch of their super serumed bodies, sobs dragging out of the very cores of them. Bucky lands in the middle of Steve’s chest, and Steve’s arms crush around him.

 _I’m sorry._  She thinks Steve is saying, _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

And Bucky’s face is hidden so she can’t read his lips, but she suspects it’s something like _Shut up, Steve_. Because the other falls silent, and holds him, and they’re both kind of melting into each other, like if only they could press hard enough, they’d meld together and never have to be parted again.

She has read Plato’s theory of wholes, and in this moment, she thinks she can confirm that matching halves are existent, and here they are fitting together before her eyes.

They end up on the ground, twisted into each other, Steve sitting down and Bucky on his knees between his legs, and somehow a metal hand and a real one uncurl from the arms pinning them to find Steve’s face, to hold it between them. Bucky leans over and kisses him soundly, stealing away all of the other’s air, hair falling around their faces.

The sound that comes from Steve is wounded, like he’s dying, or maybe that’s the sound someone makes when their lungs work properly again for the first time, when they’re finally able to feel the beat of their heart in their chest, when the pain rises and fades, and unbearable vulnerability is left behind.

Her brother has shifted near them, laughter lining his face, and he sits himself down onto the ground, a hand to Steve’s shoulder. Grounding, loving, close.

And she loves them more than she can bear.

As she turns on her heel, shaking her head, she almost runs into Tony, watching from afar.

“Go.” She laughs at him, exasperated. “Go and be with them. It will be okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

He looks like he wants to protest, but she crosses her arms. “Go. I am still Queen, you are on my land. I order you.”

Shock, and then amusement. “You’ve been spending too much time with Rogers.” The grouse comes, but go he does.

She doesn’t have to look back to know she’s completely right.

After all, she is a genius.

\--

“So we look up to some weird adults, huh?”

Peter is watching from the window, brow furrowed, when she is back inside the palace.

“It would be boring otherwise.” She shrugs with a smile. “They need us, I think, more than we need them.”

“Yeah!” His exuberance makes her laugh, and it is good to laugh, it is good to be younger again, and not a Queen and perhaps a child. “I mean, I need Mr. Stark, but I think maybe he needs me too. I guess he didn’t get on too well without me…”

He trails off and she interjects, refusing to allow this right now. She is light, her world is light. She will not be sad.

“Would you like to see my lab?” She offers instead, a little sly, and his eyes light up again. “It is not on fire this time.”

“Let’s build something awesome.” Their voices trail behind them as they walk towards her wing, hers again, the place she belongs.

“But not too awesome -” She warns, a grin curving on her face. “We’ve had quite enough of that.”

It is good, in fact, to heal.


End file.
